TheNostr Observer

Kyiv

One Minute Down The Street

A father on paternity leave heard the explosion from his own kitchen — and kept writing code that afternoon anyway.

From posts by Terry Yiu

Terry Yiu had dropped his wife at her office in central Kyiv about an hour earlier. An hour after dropping my wife off at her office, a Russian drone struck the Security Service headquarters one minute down the street. I could hear the explosion from home. She, her team, and her office are fine. Several people were hospitalized and the restaurant next door was heavily damaged.

He has no plans to leave. My wife is Ukrainian, we have businesses here, and our child was just born here. Also, Kyiv is arguably one of the best cities in the world, even with the war ongoing.

The same stretch of days, on paternity leave, he has been rebuilding one of his own apps from scratch. While on my paternity leave, I've been rewriting my SatsPrice app with the help of Claude Code. He said he'd reached near feature parity at roughly ten times his old pace, and was a currency-preferences bug away from shipping it.

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Mining

OCEAN Loses Its Captain

Hashrate down 96% in a month, and the departing chairman is already building a rival.

BTC Prague had it first: Luke Dashjr is out at OCEAN. Resigned as chairman, CTO and director on 29 Aug. Mummolin repurchased all his equity. Stated reason: "different visions for the future of Bitcoin mining." Nothing more specific. He is starting CONVOY. OCEAN's hashrate fell 96% in August. What does this do to template diversity?

By Saturday, at least one miner had noticed the pool was moving again — no numbers attached: Ocean has resumed ⚡️, GrowMilkweedPlants wrote.

The exit comes as mining capacity is being pulled toward a different customer entirely. Hyperscale Data shut down every miner at its 617,000-square-foot site in Dowagiac, Michigan, on September 1st, handing the site's power to a $1.2 billion contract with an unnamed California cloud provider instead. Power availability, not capital, not chips, is what decides where the AI buildout lands.

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Security

A Rough Month To Trust Your Hardware

A patched nostr bug, a bigger Trezor breach, and a peer-to-peer exchange locking its own front door.

Zapstore pushed an emergency update this week. It was released last week and contains a fix for a major security bug found in an underlying library, related to nostr event verification. … Found by ethicnology, thank you Sir (couldn't find his nostr profile, he deserves some zaps!)

Bitcoin Magazine's wire desk reported that the Trezor breach disclosed weeks ago is worse than first said: another 67,000 US customers' data has since turned up exposed. The Coldcard exploit is still being worked through in podcast form, too — this week's Ask a Bitcoiner episode carried a bounty for anyone willing to talk through self-custody trade-offs in its wake, while Bitcoin Audible ran a Q&A on whether dice rolls can still be trusted to generate a seed.

And Peach paused the one thing that made its marketplace usable. Peach has paused its escrow. Sell offers are KYC or whitelist only and non KYC sellers get one trade at a time. The escrow was the safety. If you use it, be very careful now. Ungovernable, posting the warning, pointed traders toward Hodl Hodl, Bisq and RoboSats instead.

Elsewhere, Dark Web Informer flagged a 9.8-severity Linux root-privilege exploit, CVE-2026-52924, now public on GitHub — a reminder this week's trouble wasn't only bitcoin-shaped.

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Nostr

The Paper Has Company

The generator behind this front page isn't a secret, and today two people this reader follows talked about it in the open. EZ pointed followers to the code: everyone can generate their own version, linking the NosFabrica repository on GitHub, then ran one for themselves a little later: just generated the first issue of The Nostr Observer via my npub, let's see how well the clanker did

Separately, on the same relay this edition was read from, Vitor Pamplona has been demonstrating a web-of-trust search tool. Web of trust search is very different than regular search he wrote, and later: The beautiful thing about doing a Web of Trust Search on Nostr is that we already have the entire Wikipedia indexed (thanks to GitCitadel), but your friends' posts will always come first, even if you misspell your search.

Elsewhere in the ecosystem, the Human Rights Foundation put out its 16th AI newsletter. Chinese tech giant Huawei is bidding to expand Egypt's AI capacity, which could bring more powerful AI tools into the hands of a dictatorship. The same issue flagged a friendlier release — Perplexity's Portable Computer, a local-first AI agent meant to stay off anyone else's server — alongside a tutorial on running a private AI server from Freedom Tech educator Ben Perrin.

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Notebook

Loose Ends

Loki spent part of the afternoon on Gustav Klimt: The "degenerate" that outlasted the Nazis — Klimt. His paintings were saved from the censorship and burnings associated with the regime, and despite the association with the wealthy Jewish community of Vienna and the eroticism of his work, most of his paintings survive intact.

WORD5 puzzle #701 made its usual rounds — Max Trotter, A.A.Ron, Onyx Cat Pottery, Pete Winn and Turner all filed their grids, solved anywhere from three guesses to a hard-mode four.

hodlbod, overnight: Don't vibe specs, kids Fiatjaf, the next afternoon, apparently unprompted: Vibe: kids don't spec.

Two bylines, one article: both “Mary” and “sarah” filed word-for-word versions of “The Silicon Valley Lesson Nostr Refuses to Learn” for NostrMag today, and a matching pair of travel pieces besides. Look at Twitter/X, Instagram, and TikTok. What do they have that Nostr lacks? They have bots, They have corporate accounts, They have paid promotion, They have automated engagement. — filed under Mary's name; sarah's copy read the same.

A two-line Stoic aphorism from Wild Burro — I cannot control the external. Therefore the external cannot control me. It's my reaction to the external that controls me — pulled in 753 sats, more than most of the day's photographs managed.